Popsugar Challenge
(7/50) over 10%!
A past Goodreads Choice Awards winner (2014)- The Opposite of Loneliness, by Marina Keegan A friend of mine gave me this book ages ago, and I’ve been wanting to read it, but… well, you know the story of my TBR by now.
It’s a series of essays and short stories written by a young woman who died five days after her graduation from Yale. She wanted to be a writer. After she died, her parents and teachers got together and put this book together.
Some of the stories and essays are fantastic. I particularly liked the title essay. Some of the stories are bleak, and I didn’t enjoy those as much. I’m so impressed that such a young woman wrote such lovely stories though.
Probably the thing that had the most impact on me wasn’t anything in her stories; it was in the Forward, where her professor talks about how Marina kept a list of “Interesting Things,” and that’s part of where she got the idea for her stories. I’m glad she told me that because I would have been wondering. Some of the stories are weird (in a good way) and I would have wondered about a college student thinking of those things.
Overall, it was absolutely worth reading.
While I Was Reading Challenge
(1/12)
A book you chose for the cover- Release, by Patrick Ness: I tackled this choice by going the the library, looking at the “New YA Fiction” shelf, and grabbing the first book that caught my eye. I like train tracks, and I loved that a boy seems to be dangling from them upside down. The cover has absolutely no relation to what the book is about, but that’s always the challenge, isn’t it?
This is two stories in one. There’s the contemporary story of Adam Thorn and one monumental day in his life, when pretty much everything that can change for him, does. It’s a story about love and loss and sex and family. It was a captivating story. Then there’s the secondary story, about a murdered girl who’s spirit latches on to a fairy queen. And if the spirit doesn’t learn how to let go, the world ends.
I understood all the symbolism and how the stories are meant to relate, but I found the fairy queen portion of the story boring. Generally I love fantastical elements, but this one felt thrown in, like the author didn’t want to leave a great contemporary story alone and added some fantasy just to have it. I read it all, just in case I actually ended up needing to know it for Adam’s story to make sense. I didn’t; I could have skipped it.
Overall I liked this book. I would have loved it if we stuck with Adam.
The Unread Shelf
Total: 1
5 Classic Books
(0/5) No progress
Miscellaneous Reading
None
2018 Running Total: 13
Have you made any progress on your TBR or book challenges?
Doree Weller 